


It Ain’t No Thang (the truth is not as alluring as you’d think)

by Adanska



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Backstory, Budapest, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-20
Updated: 2012-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 21:43:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/816375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adanska/pseuds/Adanska
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You want to know a secret? Alright, here it is: there was absolutely nothing special about Budapest.</p>
<p>Either time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Ain’t No Thang (the truth is not as alluring as you’d think)

**Author's Note:**

> I am firmly in the camp of 'nothing special happened' in regards to Budapest. Sorry.

You want to know a secret? Alright, here it is: there was absolutely nothing special about Budapest.

Either time.

  
  
It's 1993, and the girl who would be Natasha Romanova is treating herself to a small vacation. She has done what they came here to do, an American business man dead by her young hands and just barely beginning to smell by the time she slipped her handlers watch, racing through the back alleys and changing her clothes as she ran. By the time they hit the open market, she has disappeared into the bustling crowd, bright hair covered by an ill-kept scarf.

It is her first time really out in the populous, and she is fascinated. So many people, bustling around in their little lives, with no idea that the small girl eeling through them could kill them with greater ease than tying her pointes. She watches families and friends chatter and laugh, and finds it very strange.

She only runs into the man who would be Barton by accident--or, rather, he runs into her. He is just barely on the safe side of malnourished, bones sticking out in awkward angles, blonde hair lanky and dull as it spills over his face; she notices this in the span of time it takes for him to knock them down, lets her body go loose as they skid across the dirty ground.

There is someone chasing him; police, she'd guess, judging by the way his hands had automatically slid to grab her (non-existent) money, the hard glint in his eyes. American, displaced and without friends; she finds herself curious.

"Davaj," she says, and pulls him by his calloused hands into the crowd.

"Thanks," he says in return, once she's gotten him well and truly out of sight. "Owe ya one, Red."

She does not understand the words--American accents are still hard, and his is slurred and thick--but she gets the meaning, and nods. They go their separate ways, him to whatever trouble wears him thin, her to her handlers with their stone hands and red rooms. She doesn't find the memento he'd slipped her until much later, hands corded tight in the transport back to base. It is a carved wooden clasp, a bird in flight, tucked tight into her scarf.

She is not allowed to keep it, but it's nice while it lasted (until they take that day from her again and again).

  
  
The second time, they are on opposite sides of an assassination. He is to take out the Minister of Foreign Affairs; she is to stop him. It is early in 2001, months before the two towers fall and before they both meet more in cities of wind and sand; she is nineteen, he is twenty-six, and between them they have killed a city's worth of people (between them, they will kill many cities more).

They come to a draw, two master assassins fighting for something that isn't patriotism but doesn't have a good word otherwise and so it will have to do. He gets closer to a kill shot than her side likes; she gets closer to putting a blade between his ribs than his side would like (after, he tells her that they bench him for that, an endless round of trying to tear him down, calling into question his intelligence his nerves his loyalty. Later, he'll tell her that in a way, the towers coming down was a relief, because it meant that the interrogations stopped and the missions began again. Someone else would react in horror to that sentiment; she merely nods. She felt the same way; but, of course, she is not American).

  
  
The third time they are on the same side, the enemy of my enemy is my friend when they have grenade launchers. Clint gets out with a broken ankle and three cracked ribs; she gets out with a fractured jaw and a three inch laceration on her head. It was December of 2005; before the American new year, she will have defected, caught by him not even a city away (they will argue for the rest of their lives about whether or not it was really defecting; she had been acting as an independent agent since she was twenty, cut loose after their second Budapest, because it wasn't just Barton's country that was angry at their investment; she will cry defecting, he will cry negotiating a new contract, and they will both be right and they will both be wrong; what else is new), pins her down in the scope of his gun and doesn't take the shot. In one disobeyed order, he earns himself another year of questioned loyalties and an enforced stay that is really a prison sentence; he earns her never-ending, un-payable debt. Her ledger is red, but only on the pages bearing his name; she is an _assassin_ , darling: she never regrets her kills.

  
  
The last time Before New York (before Russia, before Loki, before Compromised and Initiative), it is spring. The year is 2011; she is twenty-nine, he is thirty-six, and for once, neither is there to kill anyone.

They walk the market they first met; he tells her in scattered farsi about the 'family' he'd been working for at the time, about making his move with the bulk of an entire shipment and their ledgers before bolting for the fucking embassy; she tells him in rolling tagalong about the former spy she'd been sent to kill, about how the kill had been so clean the blood hadn't even touched her hands from the blade, how she'd done it with grace although her feet had been aching from her ballet lessons. He buys a scarf from her at a stall and wraps it himself; she finds the little wooden broach immediately, pins it to the fabric so it seems set to fly away. He laughs, self deprecating, and it is this that she thinks of during the showdown, his little shrug of 'you got me, Tash' and her small smirk. They remember Budapest differently; but, isn't that true of anyone?


End file.
